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Lamenting this, lamenting that, the kind of lamenting that so often defines a person of a certain age. You near 60 and suddenly you’re crotchety, always complaining about how nothing is as good as it once was, and how the young ’uns are layabouts and how social media has killed both civility and intelligent discourse and how humanity surely can’t survive much more of the neglect and ignorance bestowed upon it by the latest ill-equipped crop of global caretakers, especially the always-feuding political leaders who can’t seem to fix anything.

You wrestle with technology, too, seeing it as both an evil universal distraction for the masses and a welcome life facilitator, but are less drawn to its addictive charms than many, which confuses the young bloods you know and, for sure, frustrates your employer, who fervently wishes you would actually use the Twitter account they set up for you.

Though hardly a new concept for the senior crowd, there’s never been a better time to be a lamenter, even while acknowledging that life today is truly better than it ever was, that modern society is a good place in which to reside, what with the vast improvements in medicine, television and pushup bras.

But some things, because culture is a cyclical beast and because humans are by nature slow learners, are still worth lamenting.

Like the Chicken McNuggetizing of news and information.

We have, in the past decade, become an ADHD world, our collective attention span lasting no longer than the beat of a hummingbird’s wing.

We have been conditioned, and continue to be conditioned, to Facebook, Tweet, blog, post and text (yes, they are all verbs) throughout our waking hours, sharing everything from the dull minutiae of our day to the latest big thing to show up on the global radar, be it an oil tanker debate, a celebrity baby named Press or the recent purchase of a rad new baseball cap.

In 2012, it has become subliminally imperative to be part of a worldwide conversation, even if you don’t know what that conversation is about, or who started it, or why. The only goal is to wade into the slipstream without restraint and pass each gem along with nary a second thought.

Remember Kony 2012? The short film released a month ago in an effort to stop the brutal reign of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony? The short film, since somewhat discredited, that attracted 100 million Internet viewers, and prompted global outrage and online campaigns to bring him to justice? Whatever happened to Kony? Oops, lost interest. He’s off the radar, gotta move on to the next big thing, especially with Ashton Kutcher’s Bollywood impersonations burning up the Net.

We know what’s hot and what’s not, of course, because we are into trending.

Trending is what dozens of websites and blogs and major media outlets do daily to keep us up to speed on what’s attracting Internet eyeballs, and thus what we should care about and pay attention to should we not be able to figure that out for ourselves, which clearly we can’t.

Websites like BuzzFeed and Trendsmap plot the top interest-generators on the Web. One day this week, two of the three most popular viral draws on BuzzFeed were 45 Reasons We Can’t Have Nice Things and 23 Reasons Why May Is Going To Be The Best Month Ever.

Another big trender this week, all over the globe, was the blog of the young Texas parents who created a bucket list for their terminally ill baby, a list that included taking in a baseball game, eating a cupcake, flying a kite, playing with Play-Doh, racing a convertible, having a bad hair day, meeting relatives and eating solid food. Some of their goals were achieved before their five-month-old daughter, Avery, died on Monday. Forget the inanity of the bucket list choices or the underlying creepiness of it, or who the bucket list was really serving. The three million devotees of the blog called it “inspirational.” Nobody stopped to say out loud, “Hmm, isn’t this just a little unseemly?” because it was touted as cool and, besides, Avery’s turn in the spotlight faded as soon as an octopus eating a seagull took over the viral charts.

Is all this that bad a thing?

Some of us lamenters think so, because nothing seems to stick to the wall long enough to invite critical thinking, and because some of us lamenters think the Tweetosphere is causing our cerebra to constrict tighter than a Sumo wrestler’s arteries.

We are today an increasingly filterless society, spammed to death, our capacity to separate wheat from chaff lost in a brave new bite-size Chicken McNuggets world.

Some of us think that’s worth lamenting.

sfralic@vancouversun.com

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